Prometheus 6

I'm no musical puritan. Music was just as much about sex back in the day though we used euphemisms rather heavy-handedly. I'm no puritan at all. And I'm not anti hip-hop, though I do see it as a larger thing than commercial music. The problem this sort of thing is supposed to demonstrate how cool and strong the performer is, and it's done in terms the audience understands. This sort of male sexual dominance display reduces the woman to currency in power transactions. And the constant repetition has the impact of The Big Lie; anything heard often enough become a legitimate thought to think. Again, no one should feel it legitimate to see folks as a pile of sexual organs…and again, Black folks can less afford to do it than anyone else.

Black men and women should treat each other well. And neither one should fuck anyone they don't genuinely like.

I'll admit that I've only seen the video once, but the few minutes that I saw left an indelible image in my mind - that of a young black male, running a credit card through the "crack" of a young black woman's behind as if it were a direct payment of some sort. The image is of course from the music video for Nelly's song "Tip-Drill," already a classic on BET's overnight
pornographic showcase UnCut. I'll also admit that a few years ago I would have found such a brash depiction of the hip hop generation's male/female relations in an era of cash and carry sexual politics ironic. But taking seriously the world that my young daughters are charged with navigating, there was something disturbing and indeed frightening about the possibility
of them being reduced to giant sexualized credit card machines (akin to Akinyele's "Six Foot Blow Job Machine"). Some of the young women at Spelman College, the historically black all-women's college in Atlanta, also found Nelly's "Tip Drill" video offensive and earlier this month mounted a demonstration to protest his planned appearance on their campus.

Nelly was to appear on the Spelman campus on April 2nd in support of a bone marrow drive sponsored by his foundation 4Sho4Kids. Nelly began to raise consciousness about the need for more blood stem cell and bone marrow donors after his sister was diagnosed with leukemia last year. But for some of the women at Spelman College, no amount of good will by the rapper excused his role in circulating misogynistic images of black women. As Asha Jennings, the head of the college's Student Government Organization told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "We care about the cause, and we understand the need for bone marrow is so great within the minority community," but "We can't continue to support artists and images that exploit our women and put us out there as over-sexed, nonintelligent human beings." In response to the planned protest, Nelly and his foundation pulled out of the event. According to reports, the Student Government Organization at Spelman only agreed to host the event if Nelly agreed to also appear at a forum where he could address the implications of his "Tip-Drill" video.

For the uninitiated, "Tip-Drill" is a ghetto colloquialism for the proverbial "ugly girl with a nice body." In the context of Nelly's video, such women are only good for one thing - and even then, only from the back. "Tip-Drill" is representative of a world where young black men often view young black women as "chickenheads," "skeezers," "gold-diggers," "birds" and a host of other unsavory adjectives. The common denominators are that such women are viewed as being solely motivated by their desire for money and are only valued as sex objects, hence the highlighting of cash and carry sexual relationships. In many ways "Tip-Drill" is the logical follow-up to "You Owe Me," Nas's club hit from 2000. The song, which was produced by Timbaland and features vocals by Ginuwine, drops gems like "Shorty, say what's your price/Just to back it up/You can hold my ice/Now let's say you owe me something/Yeah, owe me back like you owe your tax/Owe me back like forty acres to blacks." The latter lyric incredibly equates Nas's "getting some ass" with reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans. On the recent DVD release of the Nas Video Anthology Volume 1, the artist quips that he simply wanted a "club hit."